>>From the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.
[ Silence ]
>>Peggy Pearlstein: Good afternoon everyone.
Well, let's see.
Good afternoon...good afternoon everyone.
I'm Peggy Pearlstein, Head of the Hebraic Section here in the African
and Middle Eastern Division of the Library of Congress and I'm going
to tell you a little bit about today's program
and then introduce you to Fenta Tiruneh who's responsible
for the haric [phonetic]
and tegrinin [phonetic] collections here at the library.
Today's speaker Dr. Heran Sereke-Berhan will be talking
about Coffee, Culture
and Intellectual Property Rights: The Case of Ethiopia.
And it will be followed by a coffee tasting
in our conference room following her lecture.
Those of us here in the division had some samples the other day
and so we highly recommend that you stay
and taste some Ethiopian coffee.
If you will be part of the question and answer
that follows the presentation, please be advised
that you are consenting to your participation in today's program
and it will be webcast by the library and available
on its website at all times.
I also want to alert you to a program that we're having
on Monday here in our reading room; it will be a presentation
about a new Passover Haggadah which is the booklet that's recited
at the Seder meal on the eve of Passover and there are more fliers
up in the front by the information desk.
And now I would like to introduce you
to Senior Reference Librarian Fentahun Tiruneh.
>>Fenta Tiruneh: Thank you Peggy.
You all make me feel excited about today's show.
I welcome you all on behalf of the African-Middle Eastern Division.
Before I go into the introducing the main speaker...
[ Pause ]
...I would like to introduce...well, I have two announcements
and the first one is about the coffee ceremony that we're going
to have and serendipity some how played a part
and we're having a sort of a two show with one event.
I would like to introduce Abeba Tilahun.
Ms. Tilahun please come over.
Abeba Tilahun is a culinary expert and she has done a lot of shows
on coffee and food all over the United States but she happened
to call when I was in need of someone to help me
with the coffee service; she just called on time and then I happened
to mentioned to her that we are having this event on Thursday
and she volunteered today to be the master of ceremony for today's.
And not only that but she has brought all the stuff
and she has mobilized her husband which just happened to come
from California and she's just a lot...she's given us a lot of love
and she brought the coffee from home and she has fixed bread,
Ethiopian style I think, and you're going
to enjoy a whole lot of the show today.
So, thank you very much Abeba.   Please give her a hand.
The second announcement is about what Dr. Heran wrote and it's
in reference to what she's lecturing today.
We have about 15 to 20, not 15, about 17 articles, issues,
or copies of her article and you can...it's going to be given
out on a first come first serve basis and she will be happy
to sign that article for you.
And now I will introduce our speaker Dr. Heran and she has I think agreed
with me that I call her Dr. Heran.
Sereke-Berhan, I don't know if you want to call her Sereke-Berhan.
It means the dawn of light.
Dr. Heran Sereke-Berhan was most recently a postdoctoral fellow
at the Frederick S. Pardee for the Center for the longer range future
and visiting researcher
at the African Studies Center of Boston University.
Today's lecture is the result of her research work in this university.
After earning her doctorate in African History
from Michigan State University in 2002 she has initiated
and participated in projects that combine her interest
in historical research with a passion for the arts and culture,
including arts exhibitions, performances
and publications on the arts.
She spent four years in Ethiopia where she worked
as academic director for the school
for the International Trading Study Abroad Program.
She's currently working as a research and development associate
at the Ethiopian Committee Development Council
in Arlington, Virginia.
Between 2005 and 2006 she was an assistant professor at the Institute
of Ethiopian Studies in [inaudible] the university.
Dr. Heran has written numerous conference papers
and made several presentations and talk shows.
Among here notable works is the most recent issue and the special issue
of the Journal of Ethiopian Studies that she edited in honor
of Professor Richard Pankhurst and his spouse Rita Pankhurst.
My testimony of Dr. Heran is that she's a very, very loving person.
I have not seen many that have combined knowledge
with humility and love.   Please welcome Dr. Heran.
>>Dr. Heran Sereke-Berhan: Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen.
Thank you so much Fenta.
That was a very moving introduction and thank you for the organizers,
Peggy, everybody who's been working on this and Abeba.
My goodness, I wouldn't have been the person to make coffee.
I don't even know how to make coffee the right way and coffee puts me
to sleep so I can't drink it.
So, thank you very, very much for doing this.
This study was conducted 2009-2010 and the year that I was in Boston
at Boston University and it was part of a year long theme
on Africa titled Africa 2060 which considered sort of the future
of Africa, possibilities, challenges and opportunities at 50 years
into the future and then a conference at the end
of this also happened titled Africa 2060, The Good News from Africa.
Which sounds suspiciously like a religious gathering
but is it was a very, very strong and influential conference
on positive outcomes, things that are happening
in Africa today that we can talk about.
My own introduction to the issue of intellectual property kind
of came through the back door.
I was working on a CD recording with a friend of mine who's a poet
and some musicians and the central idea
to it was a little bit experimental.
It was about musicians actually listening to words.
They never do so if you sing the song,
musicians don't know the lyrics, they don't know where in the song
that word is so I threw out a challenge to some friends,
musician friends, and we put together a CD with poetry
and really good jazz in Ethiopian variation music and then we set
about trying to copy the CD, reproduce it and sell it
and everything came to a standstill.   The choices were very few.
The first was we either paid for the printing
and reproduction upfront ourselves or we dealt
with distributors who'd give us a one-time payment
and there was no room for renegotiating or, you know,
market circumstances to renegotiate what was going on later on and
or the third choice was to go in with a distributor half and half
and that might or might not work.
So, the project came to a standstill and I quickly realized
that despite the fact that there was copyright laws
and the artists had been, you know, advocating for copyright,
the musicians especially in Ethiopia in a daily way in a way
that made any sense at all this didn't have bearing
on artists' lives, that this wasn't going to be something
that artists look to to kind of get their rights
over their works protected
or that they would even have an income anything that was of use
for them from their works.
So, this kind of set off a set of questions in my mind as to
who owns what so, I mean, the first question of course was, you know,
the muze might come and go but creativity seldom happens
in a vacuum so who ultimately owns a creative idea was one
of my questions and then I thought
about all the different areas specialized knowledge that's been
passed from generation to generation in areas like medicinal plants
and artisanal crafts and sacred performances; the list is very long,
agricultural cultivation.   Who owns those ideas?
Is it the community that produces it and has custody over it
or is it the companies that invest in the research and development part
and then they transform that body of knowledge into goods and services.
So, all of these questions were buzzing around in my head
and from there it kind of took more formal shape for Africa
that I thought was interesting to investigate.
So, the two questions that I kind of wanted
to address was can Africa be positioned to benefit
from this knowledge production in any way
and then eventually can Africa compete with the international arena
of cultural knowledge production.
Big questions and so part of the answer I knew was going to lie
in sort of examining the relationship
between intellectual property rights and Africa in relation to culture.
I'm sure most of you know this but this is a very new area for me so I,
you know, sort of came up with a working definition
of what intellectual property meant and intellectual property, IP,
it refers to a number of distinct types of creation of the mind
for which a set of exclusive rights are recognized
with corresponding areas of the lobbying applicable
and they resemble in many ways property rights
and in this case the honors are granted rights
over intangible assets so it could be artistic works, literary works,
musical works, words, phrases, symbols, designs and the like.
The main aim of intellectual property rights,
the basic purpose is three fold in its most simplified form.
First, it protects the inventors or creators
of the idea from counterfeit users.
Second, it awards them some kind of moral rights over their works
so they decide whether they want to sell it of not sell it or reproduce
and put it out there, they decide.
And then the third is somehow to make these creations available
to the wider public and arguably I think these three things have even
within the legal framework have some kind of tension between them,
between protecting the artists' rights and then making it available
and so there's a lot of literature on sort of the ethical stance
of these three different purposes; the legal and economic
and policy implications, there's a whole lot of literature on that.
What I discovered was the areas of IP law, intellectual property law,
patents, industrial designs, trade secrets, copyrights
and trademarks were very different in the way that they were,
the law was had developed over the years
and the legal principles evolved in different ways
and these legal fields were extremely specialized so one
of the people that I ended up interviewing really cautioned me
against mixing these areas, you know,
intellectual property trademark, mixed those issues
with intellectual property copyright issues.
Don't mix those issues because these are very specialized areas
of the legal field.
So, they're seldom seen as a package holistically;
they're almost never are so but if they were,
one can conceivably argue the case that the overall effect
of these laws is a monopoly of knowledge production and access
and that's provocative onto itself but if one was ever able to consider
and I'm not a legal, I don't have legal background
so I wouldn't know the intricacies of this but I kind of arrived
at this that if we were to consider these holistically,
can we argue that as a whole there was some monopoly
of knowledge production and access through IP laws.
The legal principles behind the notions
of intellectual property evolved over many centuries and it wasn't
until the 19th Century that the term itself came into use.
It became even more common place in the 20th Century here in the US
and people point to the British Statute of Anne from 1710
and the Statute of Monopolies in 1623 which are seen sort
of as the origins of copyright and patent law respectively.
These two conventions, international conventions, are very important
as sort of the beginning
of formalizing intellectual property laws.
I won't get into them in much detail.
The first one was signed in 1883 and it sort of deals
with industrial property in its widest sense which includes patents,
marks, industrial designs, trade names, geographical indications
and it laid down sort of the common rule that member states,
all member states, signatory member states would follow.
The Berne Convention deals more particularly with copyright
over for works of authors and this one established a system
of equal treatment
that internationalized copyright among signatory states
and it also put into place the idea of fair use for copyrighted works
in publications and broadcasts.
Now the nature of protection varied very much from country-to-country
and it was adapted as seen for a particular need.
Towards the end of World War II western innovations and radio,
television and satellite technology made a very new foundation
of knowledge economy and instead of agricultural production,
goods and services became the basis of wealth and the competitive edge
in this knowledge economy depended very much on innovative qualities
that these goods and services exhibited so IP laws were created
and strengthened to protect these innovative qualities.
Furthermore, later on improvements in production
and distribution systems led to greater trade activities
in western economies which in turn exposed the risk of,
increased the risk of exposing these innovative qualities to copying
and counterfeiting which ultimately would rob them
of their competitive edge.   So this lack of uniform protection
over innovative qualities led western interest groups to push
for the integration of trade and intellectual property laws
to better protect wealth created from intellectual property.
So now intellectual property becomes intertwined with trade
and these two pieces are very important
in the international arena.
The first is the establishment of the World Trade Organization
and then the trade related aspects of intellectual property rights
that it administers which really strengthened the link
between IP and trade.
The World Trade Organization was formed late in 1995 basically
to supervise and liberalize international trade
and it has different frameworks for negotiating
and formalizing trade agreements
and a dispute resolution process as well.
TRIPS is a very active set of rules that is there;
the objective of it is to support and promote innovation
and creativity to the mutual advantage of users and creators
and it sets the requirement standard for copyright rights.
It was introduced, TRIPS was introduced, it introduced IP law
into the international trade system for the first time
and it remains the most comprehensive international
agreement on IP to date.   As it pertains to Africa
and development issues the views are very mixed.
There are those that argue for it,
there are those that argue against it.
Those against it argue that there is already an uneven set of advantages
that are built into the IP system.
Africa is not recognized as a significant contributor
to the production of knowledge and if Africa is recognized at all,
the originators of knowledge are quickly factored
out of a value chain which awards the research
and development investments through the benefits of trade.
They also argue that developing economies are already on the margins
of global trade relations and observing any kind
of intellectual property rights will only entrench the continent even
further into those margins.   Those that argue for the case
of observing intellectual property rights claim
that it would eventually decrease Africa's dependency
on agricultural products and commodities
and Africa is largely relegated to this production of commodities
and agricultural products and this is vulnerable to market changes
and environmental factors and Africa is always suffering
from that kind of vulnerability.
Those for it also argue that it will allow eventually Africa
to the developing economies in Africa
to bypass traditional market arrangements and eventually leapfrog
into generating higher export incomes
through using intellectual property tools and the debate rages on.
There is no consensus really.
One advocate of using these intellectual property tools
to benefit African economies based here
in DC is a development group known as Light Years IP and this group,
what this group stands for or did was it recognized early
on the importance of the intangible value of products
in generating corporate income in the US
and they define intangible value as none physical characteristics
of products such as uniqueness, reputation or tradition.
And here in the US commonly this is represented
in a company's IP portfolio and this includes technological know how,
brands, trademarks, patents and other forms.
Intangible assets over the years have become the greater part
of a company's income and the importance has shifted
from being solely a legal issue to being a core part
of overall business strategy.
Small and large businesses in the US seek profitable licensing programs
and market niches through design and packaging
and so Light Years IP suggests that transposing these standard practices
to international export trade will help developing countries seeking
to capture higher returns from their products
and so the countries can therefore focus from increasing production
of commodities to using IP tools
to enhance their intangible value determined by uniqueness, reputation
and tradition and I mentioned Light Years IP because they were the group
that eventually advised the Ethiopian group
that began this initiative for a trademark for coffee.
In terms of coffee itself the world trade in coffee has changed
over the years and as early as the 6th Century Abyssinia,
the area that Ethiopia now is in, was the principle region
that was supplying the Arabic world and supplies reached Yemen,
currently what's Yemen today, around the 15th Century or earlier;
from there it went to Southeast Asia as far as Cylon and Sumatra,
then the Dutch's East Indies soon became an important region
for coffee production and between the 16th
and the 19th Century other colonial powers introduced coffee
into their territories.
Coffee like other prime commodities suffers from over production
which also results in very dramatic rises and falls of price.
The market fluctuations
and peculiarities are very specific to coffee.
I don't know how many of you may remember but between 1999
and 2004 was sort of the lowest decline
of coffee prices in 30 years.   It was very dramatic
and the international market created a global crisis pretty much and part
of the reason for this crisis what had happened was that there was an
over supply of coffee in the market and part of that was based
on the policies of multinational financial institutions
such as the IMF and the WTO that had offered loans to poorer countries.
In this case I think it was Vietnam and suddenly Vietnam went
from being a small producer in the early 1990's to the second largest
by 2000 and so this didn't,
unfortunately this didn't necessarily result in higher income
or better livelihoods for the farmers themselves
because the oversupply kept the prices low.
This caused a crisis, a huge crisis for coffee farmers and this is
about we're talking about 30 to 60 million of the world's population
and there was mass migration to urban centers.
Those who decided to stay on their farmlands in Ethiopia a lot
of them decided to grow khat instead of coffee.
This is in our culture that is consumed widely in the Middle East
and in the Horn of Africa and it's a kind of crop
that doesn't even require much in terms of maintenance
and immediately the fate of farmers changed because a bushel
of khat also known as qat could sell for as high as $9.
Well, coffee at that time would bring 0.01 cents
so the math was very clear.   There are certain peculiarities
to the coffee industry and the coffee market.
On the consumer side demand is never affected,
it's not affected very greatly by price change.
On the supply side farmers might be able
to increase their yield short-term by using fertilizers
but there's a very cyclical nature to the coffee growing period.
It takes anywhere from three to five years to grow coffee for it
to reach full production so this built-in lag time often results
in over production and price in elasticity.
The other piece to this is that the New York Coffee, Sugar,
Cocoa Exchange price which functions
as the main futures price reference price it ultimately controls the
price that's paid to farmers and there at the New York Coffee,
Sugar and Cocoa Exchange the prices paid to farmers were very different
than prices paid to producers in exporting countries
and the retail prices...sorry, let me say that again...the prices paid
to farmers were very different than the retail prices that were recorded
by importing countries and between 1999
and 2001 the futures market price fell by 57% due to this oversupply
yet during the same period the retail prices only fell
by less than 10%.   In this period between the 1990's
to around 2004 the World Coffee Market was characterized by a boom
in consumer countries
and a corresponding crisis in producing countries.
What, this has been termed the coffee paradox
which marked the departure from the assumed economic model of supply
and demand and there was this huge difference
between the global green coffee; the price fell despite increased demand
of coffee by consumers in developed countries.
Part of the cause was that this coffee that was
on the market was very low quality Robusta coffee and it was
over supplied and it harmed the producers but it resulted
in coffee roasters being able to raise their profit margins
because international prices dipped to record setting lows.
At the same time the consumer market of specialty coffee meant
that this sector recorded increasing price premiums even during
the crisis.
The specialty coffee industry was in dire need of high quality coffee
of the kind that Ethiopia produced (Yirgacheffe, Harrar, Sidamo)
and this could be easily geared towards the niche market.
There is this difference between commercial and specialty coffees.
I didn't know this until I did this research
but there are two very distinct sectors to coffee.
The industrial or commercial coffee is usually the canned
and the instant blends and the specialty coffee
or gourmet coffees are the kinds that the specialty distributors deal
with and the US is the highest consumer of world coffee followed
by Germany then Japan and industrial coffees make particular use
of Robusta beans, lesser grade coffee beans in their blends.
Specialty coffees are generally much smaller in volume
and they account only for about 10% of all coffee exports.
The price so is very, very high.   The retail estimates
in 2001 measured the total US specialty market
at nearly $11 billion and even though growers were suffering
in this period of the crisis,
international companies were reaping record profits
by taking advantage of lower prices.
Ethiopia is and was then producing Arabica beans
which is very much sought after by the specialty industry
and unfortunately though its selling price was pegged
to the New York CSCE's commodity price and so this discrepancy
between the selling price and the commodity price was one
of the key issues that the Ethiopian Fine Coffee Initiative sought
to address and I'll say a little bit more about that in a minute.
Most of you know that the, what the growing demand
for the specialty coffee industry and how that's kind
of took off here in the 1970's.
What happened as a part of the coffee cartel between Africa,
Latin America and the US collapsing, there was a cartel in place
that dealt with stabilizing volatile prices and guaranteeing some kind
of aid to coffee producing countries and fixing production quotas
for coffee exports basically to kind of stabilize the market,
but this cartel fell apart in 1989 and from that point on it was
as though all countries could compete on the market and most
of them started focusing on quality production instead
of quantity production and what this did was increase the variety
of high quality beans that were available at lower costs.
The coffee revolution started up around the same time.
Market coffees were being marketed in a very new way to a very new kind
of consumer who had sort of environmental concerns,
environmental savvy and fair trade was very knowledgeable
about fair trade concerns
and eventually these consumers would seek high quality single origin
coffees instead of blends and mixed beans from unknown locations.
The leader of this coffee,
the specialty coffee industry was Starbucks
and this had opened you've probably noticed
if you've been a Starbucks lately
that they're celebrating their 40th year.
It opened in 1971 their first coffee shop in Seattle and it grew
in popularity very, very fast and
but the Starbucks institutional demeanor I guess is sort
of a more a gentler kind of global business
with good corporate citizenship and social responsibility at its core
and to its credit Starbucks was among the first in the industry
to introduce and package single origin coffees that serve
to promote products and their sources to consumers.
So it's kind of ironic that in the actual initiatives Starbucks became
the enemy for a short time but that was resolved fortunately.
The slide that you see here has different shades of maroons
and browns, I think three different shades.
The R stands for Robusta coffee, the blend coffees;
the A stands for the Arabica, the red countries
that produce Arabica coffee;
and the M is for mixed Arabica and Robusta coffees.
Now when we come to Ethiopia the origins of coffee in Ethiopia
and I don't know anyone who knows about this legend anymore
where it came from, when it started but the story goes
that a shepherd named Kaldi took his goats up a hill
and the goats started munching on beans
and started getting very energetic and so he decided to try some
of this since they had all this energy to spare
and from there he was very inspired to share this finding
with some priests nearby and the priests tried it and they stayed
up all night praying so that helped and for those of you
who may have visited Ethiopia lately you know
that there's a chain named Kaldi's that's kind of fashioned
after Starbucks that's doing very well, a coffee cafe chain.
Over the ages practicing, the practice of drinking coffee has been
at times banned and at times accepted
by both Christianity and Islam.
In the beginning Ethiopia coffee was strongly associated with Islam
and indigenous religious practices so it made, its,
the consumption was sort of taboo among its Christian population.
Nobody would admit to this today but that's actually how it had happened
and we know this because travelers to Ethiopia
from the 19th Century sort of observed this aversion which seemed
to a have lessened towards the latter half of the century.
Maybe because and I don't know how true this is but Egyptian Aboons
who were the head of the Ethiopian church
at the time consumed this coffee and so it kind
of became a little bit more accepted and then by the first half
of the 20th century there are reports of nobility drinking coffee
and it's available in the homes that host these travelers.
Now, Ethiopia is unequipped vocally recognized as the birth place
of coffee and some even regard the name itself to have been derived
from a region in the southwest named Kofa.
Coffee still grows wild in mountain forests in Ethiopia and one
of the strongest reasons why there's this belief that coffee originated
in Ethiopia is that there is a very vast gene variation
of coffee in Ethiopia.   There are local gene banks there.
One is the Jimma Agricultural Research Center and the Institute
of Biodiversity Conservation in Limu and they've recorded a variety
of about 6,000 beans so far and counting, they're still more.
One such variety that I've heard of has been taken to Brazil
and during the emperor's time a Brazilian delegation came
and they were offered this type of bean
and it's now become the most natural decaffeinated coffee that's
available on the market.
So this wealth of diversity attests to Ethiopia's claim that the origins
and links...as the origins, the origins of coffee are there
and that the links of the survival
of the world's largest genetic pool really depends
on adequate conservation in Ethiopia.
Cultural significance it's, you know, a daily activity
in most homes in Ethiopia.
The economics to this was that Ethiopia is considered the older,
the oldest exporter of coffee.
In 2005 and I'm sure there are figures from since then
but Ethiopia was the 6th largest coffee producer
and the 7th largest exporter worldwide.
This kind of gives you a sense of why it's important as a commodity
but not so much the cultural background to this.
Coffee preparation and consumption is included
in most religious festivals for Islam and Christianity
and it also serves as a key element in sacred ceremonies
and rituals connected to indigenous religions.
In the Oromo traditional belief systems coffee is assigned
ceremonial rules as part of ritual of a ritual meal and is thought
to bring blessings through innovations and prayer and parts
of Wello coffee is thought to have spiritual powers
to protect the households and it's very venerated in certain areas.
In a woman's ritual known as Atete coffee is used as a symbol
of penance for offences that have been committed and then
in possession cults known collectively as Zar believed
to have originated in the northern highlands of Ethiopia coffee is used
to rid people of afflicted other afflictions and unwanted spirits
and it's used to stimulate recitations and prayers.
Beyond this religious context modern Ethiopian coffee ceremony borrows
some pieces from these older practices and Ethiopia ranks as one
of two countries that in which consumption is also very high.
I think the other one is Brazil
and as you can see the woman sitting there is sitting with a grazier
with coal and there's grass on the ground a little bit of green
that you see on the ground, sometimes there's flowers strewn
in there and she roasts the coffee up on top of the coal
and then the coffee is ground and brewed in the Gebena
on the clay container on the right and it's enjoyed among neighbors,
friends, people who drop in and it's brewed three times
for additional leaf [phonetic] you have the time to stick around.
It's the first, the second
and the third brewing progressively it gets weaker, the coffee.
The first is the strongest, the ABOL BUNNA and so there is quite a,
you know, maybe one would liken it to Japanese tea ceremony
or even Senegalese tea ceremony or Kenyan.
There's quite a bit of cultural significance
for coffee and coffee preparation.
There are regional variations to how it's done, how it's consumed.
Sometimes it's consumed with butter, sometimes with salt
and also the Gebenas have regional variations.
Sometimes the necks are longer, sometimes there's two spouts and,
you know, there's all kinds of aesthetics involved
in decorating the Gebena as well.
There's also a lot of knowledge in Ethiopia about coffee cultivation
and in different regions of Ethiopia
and here we have Gebenas showing the different regions produce distinct
kinds of coffees such as the Harrar, Yirgacheffe, Sidamo coffees.
Coffees cultivated by small farmers so it's not a plantation activity
and they have very rich traditional knowledge about its planting,
its harvesting and its processing.
Generally coffee is shade grown without fertilizer so it's organic
and there are four kinds of production methods: forests,
semi-forests, garden and plantation which is used
to cultivate the coffee and so it's mostly entirely organic the way the
coffee is produced.
And after it's harvested, the coffee can be processed
in two different ways, dry or wet,
and washed coffee receives higher market's price and but most
of the Ethiopian coffee itself the export
of coffee is naturally sun dried.
So coffee connoisseurs and there's a whole vocabulary
to this just like Hawaiian.
They describe Harrar, Yirgacheffe and Sidamo coffees
in very specific terms: fruity, citrusy, aromatic,
clean and bright acidity.
So, those of you who are coffee drinkers might appreciate this
or coffee with dark chocolate notes.   These are the areas.
There's more of places where coffee grows and, you know,
with 6,000 varieties, genetic varieties I'm sure we're going
to discover a whole lot more in terms of the regions
that grow specialized coffee beans.
Needless to say a lot of people depend on coffee
for their livelihoods and the estimate I've seen is close
to 15 million or one person in every five depends directly
or indirectly on coffee for income.
Ethiopia's coffee is I mentioned Arabica and this kind
of coffee grows in drier climates in mountainous elevations
of about 1,000 meters or more above sea level.
It takes much longer to reach maturity, three to five years
and it's the retail price is quite high,
$15 to $25 per pound in the global market.
The Robusta kind of coffee is more disease resistant
so that's why it makes it much more easier to grow and it grows
in much less time and in lower altitudes
and this is the coffee that's used in most blends.
I am running out of time.
Okay, let me say just a little bit about the initiative itself.
The initiative was begun by a group from Ethiopia.
The person that was at the center of it was an IP law person in Ethiopia
and his name was Getachew Mengistie and it came
out of the Ethiopian Intellectual Property office
which was established in 2003 and he partnered with Light Years,
the group in Ethiopia, partnered with Light Years IP
to examine this potential of the trademark possibility
and basically they decided to take control of the brand
by trade marking Harrar, Sidamo and Yirgacheffe coffees.
There's a little bit of technical stuff there
that maybe I'll skip over.
What they decided to use as a strategic approach why they decided
for a trademark versus geographical indicators it's a little bit
technical so I'll skip over it for now
but they did decide to pursue trademark.
And this was very hotly contested.
At the time Starbucks had already put in for a certain kind
of coffee trademark and I think these two things were not related
until they actually started butting heads, the two initiatives,
and so when the Ethiopian initiative came up and they went
to the patent office, Starbucks had already applied for this trademark
and so then that's when the problem began.
The initial response was that the coffee industry did not support this
Ethiopian registry.
They argued that the names had become generic terms for styles
of coffee and the Ethiopian team realized very quickly
that they couldn't push through this in a legal court system
and they instead decided to go public with this and when they did,
they mobilized, they sort of told the story to Oxfam
and Oxfam was very well known for their, you know,
decades long advocacy in the fair trade movement and so Oxfam decided
to make this a very public affair.
Around the same time there was the film Black Gold had been produced
that showed sort of the state of farmers and their earnings
and their lifestyle compared to sort of the coffee revolution and,
you know, the way the coffee was being marketed on this side.
He's snapping his fingers at me.   Should I stop there?
Oh, this is unfortunate.   Okay, let me stop.
Shall I stop?   I'm stopping, Fenta.
>>Fenta Tiruneh: I'm sorry.
>>Dr. Heran Sereke-Berhan: I was just getting warmed up.
>>Fenta Tiruneh: Well, maybe we compensate by...
>>This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at LOC.gov.   [ Silence ]